Software Package Removal

Scenario:

The organization you work for has decided to get rid of Adobe Reader in favor of another PDF reading and editing application. You have been tasked with removing Adobe Reader from all workstations.

Environment:

All your devices are EntraID joined, and you use Intune to manage your Windows devices.

Tactic:

You don't want to remove Adobe Reader if it is currently running otherwise you risk corrupting files. So, you have decided the best approach to accomplish this goal is to use an Intune Remediation Script Package. This is preferable over a platform script since, if Adobe Reader is currently running when the remediation script is invoked, you can exit the script with code 1. When you do this, you can output that the process is currently running (which you will see in the post-remediation detection output), then attempt to removal Adobe Reader next time the remediation script is scheduled to run.

Detection Script:

The below detection script can be used to determine if Adobe Reader is currently installed on the machine or not. This script can be used to either remove a specific version of the software (Adobe Reader in this case) or any version. For this example, we want to remove all versions of Adobe Reader so we will specify $false for the Remove_Specified_Version variable.

This script checks if Adobe Reader is currently installed on the machine. If it is, the script exits with code 1 which triggers the remediation script. If Adobe Reader is not installed, the script will exit with code 0 indicating that remediation is not required.

Remediation Script:

The below remediation script can be used to remove Adobe Reader.

This script first checks to see if the Adobe process is currently running. If it is, we exit with code 1 and attempt the removal at the next scheduled run. If the process is not running, we attempt the removal. This script uses msiexec.exe to remove Adobe Reader, and can only remove software via msiexec.exe using the package GUID.

Both the detection and remediation scripts create local log files that can be used to troubleshoot deployment issues.

The remediation script package can be downloaded here.

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SHA256:

B6FD8EF6C96C20367FB8912FE1165081655781FFE7158D0EF5CFA90AD775AF07